Roll-Your-Own vs. Off-The-Shelf: Which Is Right for You?
Do you view the decision to build-or-buy your prototyping system as a short-term cost-driven tactic or part of your functional verification strategy -- with implications on future product development?

For chip design companies that operate on huge economies of scale and adhere to a great degree of format-specific processes in their design flow, full custom capability may be important and roll-your-own becomes a feasible option.

Project budgets rarely attribute time-to-market as an outright cost, neither do they account for the resources involved in supporting and upgrading tool technologies for future projects.

For everyone else - given execution risk along with time and cost constraints - purchasing a proven prototyping system becomes hard to ignore / a much more compelling choice. Verification can consume from two-thirds to four-fifths of total development time. A mature off-the-shelf product provides guaranteed timing parameters, can be re-used for multiple designs, and comes with dedicated technical support – minimizing the risks of porting a prototype that doesn' t work according to specifications. The time spent on building a prototype from scratch is eliminated, along with associated non-recurring engineering costs, which translates to faster time-to-prototype and in the end, lower overall costs.

FPGA Prototyping Design Flow - Reiteration
SoC design specifications must often be modified due to market or technical reasons. Therefore, it is important to keep the FPGA prototyping environment flexible, in case such events occur. The diagram below illustrates the flow difference when design undergoes significant changes.